Government urged to look at Surrey County Council's Send services
The government has been urged by an MP to investigate the way Surrey County Council provides special educational needs and disabilities (Send) services.In the House of Commons on Monday, Surrey Heath's Liberal Democrat MP Al Pinkerton said the authority had the highest number of tribunals in which parents challenged decisions in the country.He asked the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson: "Will she do what so many parents ask me – can she please launch an immediate investigation into Surrey County Council and its conformance with its legal obligation?"Phillipson said she would come back to the MP.
Lincoln Jopp, the Spelthorne MP, also asked if the government was looking at what was causing the rise in demand when it came to Send.Phillipson said the education department was keen to "understand some of the drivers".Surrey County Council has been approached for a comment. The council previously said it was investing £260m in Send services and increasing specialist places.
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Sky News
8 minutes ago
- Sky News
Grooming gangs report author reveals how she found word 'Pakistani' tippexed out of file
Ignoring the ethnicity of grooming gang perpetrators gives racists "more ammunition", the author of a new report has said. Baroness Louise Casey told Sky News' Politics with Sophy Ridge there was a particular issue with some British Asian men that was "abundantly clear" in data analysed from three police forces; West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester; which showed a "disproportionately" in child sexual exploitation. But she added: "Just to give some sort of balance, in Greater Manchester I asked for data on child sexual exploitation that took me to Asian heritage. I asked for data on child abuse and that took me to the general population, which is largely white." Baroness Casey said "if we just establish the facts, then you can take the pain out of this". "I think you've got sort of do-gooders that don't really want this to be found because, you know, 'Oh, God, then all the racists are going to be more racist'," she added. "Well, actually, people that are racist are going to use this anyway. All you're doing with the hate mongers and the racists is giving them more ammunition." Asked if people were worried about being seen as racist, the cross-bench peer said she came across direct examples of this in Rotherham - one of the towns at the centre of the grooming gangs scandal. "I was following through on a children's file in archive and found the word 'Pakistani' tippexed out," Baroness Casey said. "I thought whoever did that inadvertently was giving ammunition to the English Defence League that were every week, in and out, campaigning and doing their stuff in that town. "I think the problem is that people are worried about being called racist.... if good people don't grasp difficult things, bad people will, and that's why we have to do it as a society." 4:18 The government has announced there will be a full statutory inquiry into grooming gangs, as recommended by Baroness Casey's report. The government has also accepted her recommendations to introduce compulsory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in grooming cases, and for a review of police records to launch new criminal investigations into historic child sexual exploitation cases. Baroness Casey was asked to produce an audit of sexual abuse carried out by grooming gangs in England and Wales, looking specifically at the issue of ethnicity and the cultural and social drivers for this type of offending. This had never before been done despite multiple local reviews into child sexual exploitation and a seven-year national inquiry into child abuse more generally, known as the Jay Review, which concluded in 2022. The government had previously resisted calls for an inquiry into grooming gangs, after a row with tech billionaire Elon Musk brought the issue back into the spotlight in January, saying it would implement the recommendations of the Jay Review that the Tories didn't. However it changed its position following Baroness Casey's findings. She found that flawed data has been used repeatedly to dismiss claims about "Asian grooming gangs". Having examined local data in three police force areas, she found "disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds" are among suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation, as well as a "significant number of perpetrators of Asian ethnicity" who have been identified in local reviews and child sexual exploitation prosecutions across the country. She said all of this warranted further examination, insisting to Sophy Ridge that the decision was not political. Baroness Casey has also called for a tightening of the laws around the age of consent so that any penetrative sexual activity with a child under 16 is classified as rape, which the government has also accepted. She told Sophy Ridge that some perpetrators waited until their victims turned 13 as then it is "much harder to prosecute for rape". She said: "I think we have to be really clear in society that children are children and I don't see the difference between, you know, a four-year-old and a 14-year-old. If somebody is doing to them... what I talk about in my report, it's rape and we need to call it for what it is."
Telegraph
11 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Asylum seekers behind new grooming gang cases
Asylum seekers and foreign nationals are involved in a 'significant proportion' of live police investigations into child sex grooming gangs, an official report has warned. On Monday, the Government released a report by Baroness Casey which was ordered after renewed outrage over the scandal at the start of this year. In her 200-page audit, the peer accused officials of being in 'denial' about the scale of the problem and said that lessons had not been learnt from crimes committed in Rotherham a decade ago. It found that police and council leaders covered up the scale of Asian grooming gangs since concerns were first raised in 2009 because they feared being branded racist. Ahead of the release of the report, Sir Keir Starmer was forced to announce a national inquiry into the scandal in an embarrassing policy reversal. He has also ordered the National Crime Agency to carry out a nationwide investigation. Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about Asian or Pakistani suspects grooming young white girls, Lady Casey's review found police, local authorities and other agencies 'consistently failed' to fully acknowledge the fact or collect data so that the theory could be tested. She also warned that when she had reviewed about a dozen live police cases, 'a significant proportion of these cases appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals and/or who are claiming asylum in the UK'. Neither the Office for National Statistics nor the Ministry of Justice records data on the number of crimes committed by asylum seekers or foreign nationals. On Monday night, the Conservatives warned that the involvement of asylum seekers in grooming gangs must be taken seriously. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: 'I am deeply troubled to read that a significant proportion of these cases involve non-UK nationals and asylum seekers. 'This underlines the importance of securing our borders, which the Government has completely failed to do. I also call on the Government to prevent perpetrators from using human rights laws – not just asylum laws – to avoid deportation.' A record 84,200 applications for asylum were made in the UK in 2024. At the end of May, more than 14,600 migrants had crossed the Channel in small boats – up more than 30 per cent on the same point last year and the highest numbers for the first five months of a year since small boats started crossing in 2018. Unveiling the Casey report to the House of Commons, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, said any asylum seekers found guilty of grooming children or committing sexual offences would have their applications rejected. The Home Secretary said she would accept Lady Casey's recommendations in full, including the mandatory collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sex abuse and criminal exploitation cases, as well as improvements to the ethnicity data collected for victims. She also said sorry for two decades of failure. Announcing the full national inquiry, she said: 'Those vile perpetrators who have grown used to the authorities looking the other way must have no place to hide.' The about-turn on a national inquiry is an embarrassment to Sir Keir, who in January accused those demanding one of jumping on a 'far-Right bandwagon'. The inquiry will last about three years, although this is much shorter than other probes such as that into Covid lockdowns. It comes 10 years after Lady Casey wrote a damning report into the culture of denial at Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where at least 1,400 children were sexually abused by grooming gangs between 1997 and 2013. In her latest audit, she accused public bodies of having used flawed data to dismiss claims about Asian grooming gangs as 'sensationalised, biased or untrue'. 'Instead of examination, we have seen obfuscation,' she wrote. 'In a vacuum, incomplete and unreliable data is used to suit the ends of those presenting it. 'The system claims there is an overwhelming problem with white perpetrators when that can't be proved.' Lady Casey also referred to 'examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist or raising community tension'. 'Flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about 'Asian grooming gangs' as sensationalised, biased or untrue,' she said. 'This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities.' Lady Casey found that information on the ethnicity of abusers was not recorded in two thirds of cases. But her report contained local data from three forces which showed 'clear evidence of over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani heritage men'. Ms Cooper told the Commons that 800 cold cases would be investigated, a number she expected to rise to 1,000. 'Perpetrators of these vile crimes should be behind bars and paying the price of what they have done,' she said. The Home Secretary said the report found a 'deep-rooted failure to treat children as children', adding: 'A continued failure to protect teenage girls from rape, from exploitation and serious violence, and from the scars that last a lifetime. '[Lady Casey] finds … too much reliance on flawed data, too much denial, too little justice, too many criminals getting off, too many victims being let down.' Ms Cooper said the report found children as young as 10 and those with learning difficulties were singled out for grooming. 'Perpetrators [were] walking free because no one joined up the dots or because the law protected them instead of the victims that they had exploited,' she added. 'Blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness and even good but misdirected intentions all played a part in this collective failure.' The Home Secretary pledged to ensure that 'those who engaged in cover-ups' should be prosecuted. She also delivered an apology to the victims. 'To the victims and survivors of child exploitation and grooming gangs, on behalf of this and past governments and the many public authorities who have left you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain that you have suffered and the failure of our country's institutions for decades to prevent that harm and keep you safe,' she said. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: 'The Prime Minister's handling of this scandal is an extraordinary failure of leadership. After months of pressure, the Prime Minister has finally accepted our calls for a full statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs.'
Daily Mail
19 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
QUENTIN LETTS: Blimey, Kemi went for it. And a black woman saying anti-racism wasn't the most important thing fried her opponents' brains
With Sir Keir Starmer on one of his foreign jaunts – it feels a bad time to be abroad – Kemi Badenoch seized the moment. The Government was abandoning another policy position, this time on the child-rapes scandal. Sir Keir was in a distant time-zone when the cave-in was announced to the Commons. The Tories ' response would normally have been made by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. Handsome lad but a touch blurty. Mrs Badenoch sensed an opportunity. Mr Philp was demoted to note-taker and his party leader replaced him at the despatch box. Blimey, she went for it. She tore into liberal queasiness about investigating gangs of 'Asian and Pakistani heritage men'. This was the phrase Whitehall had chiselled out of granite for the occasion. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, making the announcement, resorted to a hammy mixture of sad-voice, prickly self-defence and antiseptic precision. 'We want to put them behind bars,' she said of the offenders. Every consonant was accentuated. Mrs Badenoch didn't buy the tough-guy act. 'She speaks as if this was their plan all along but we all know it's another U-turn,' she murmured in her smoky voice. Yvette sounded squeaky by comparison. Labour MPs started stirring. A blowhard from Bracknell, name of Swallow, was reprimanded by Speaker Hoyle for 'bawling' at her. Mrs Badenoch was only energised. Another Labour figure itching and gurning and jawing and rolling her eyes throughout was Jess Phillips, safeguarding minister. Deputy PM Angela Rayner and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson sat rigid. Lucy Powell, the Leader of the House who had once mocked Tory requests for an inquiry, sucked her gnashers. But Ms Phillips could not contain herself. She pulled faces to indicate that she thought opposition MPs were dim. She shrugged, laughed repeatedly and muttered asides to a neighbour. Mrs Badenoch sailed through it. She has a Nigerian Right-winger's contempt for Lefty hand-wringing. It fries her opponents' minds. You can sense their inner microchips overloading with the conundrum: a black woman saying anti-racism should not have been the predominant concern? Computer not recognise. The chamber filled with the smell of hot Scalextric wire as Lefties' synapses fused. She was angry that the absent Sir Keir just a few weeks ago dismissed calls for an inquiry as 'a bandwagon of the far-Right'. Yet now the nasal knight had done a reverse ferret, a volte-face, a gymnastic flip-and-twist whereby he was now facing in completely the other direction, arms held wide, grinning at his feat. 'An extraordinary failure of leadership!' she cried. Volume levels were rising. Mrs Badenoch relished it. Her eyes, behind their big glasses, bulged like two Rosey Apple boiled sweets. She hollered that Labour MPs voted three times to block an inquiry – 'three times!' – but were now professing delight that one would be happening. Her right arm sawed and stirred and jabbed and flew horizontally. We were almost in Margaret Hilda territory, although in place of Mrs T's blonde barnet the most noticeable thing here was the gap between Mrs Badenoch's front teeth and her pulsating denunciation of the Starmerites. 'What changed the Prime Minister's mind from thinking this is far-Right dog whistle politics to thinking it was something he must do?' And she wanted action against those in 'the police, local authorities, social service, or even the Crown Prosecution Service' who had put concerns about community ahead of stopping girls as young as ten from being raped. Even the CPS? Who can she have in mind? The following pupils appeared to be absent: Farage, N. (Clacton), Champion, S. (Rotherham) and, more surprisingly, Lowe, R. (Great Yarmouth). Jonathan Brash (Lab, Hartlepool) accused Mrs Badenoch of 'weaponising child rape to go after clicks'. A particularly damp Lib Dem, Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne), accused Mrs Badenoch of being 'party political'. In the Commons? That's the whole point of the place, poppet. Party politics is only despicable when it distorts justice. As we now can see.
